Facebook's Open-Source Servers Will Change the Industry. Right?

Facebook's bid to open-source its server architecture sounds like a technology with broad applications. But it remains unclear how the Open Compute Initiative will affect the traditional server market.

0shares

Facebook's bid to open-source its server architecture sounds like a technology with broad applications. But it remains unclear how the Open Compute Initiative will affect the traditional server market.

Facebook said Thursday that it is making the design documents and specifications of the servers used at its Prineville, Ore. data center public at OpenCompute.org. The company claims that the design of the new servers is 38 percent more power efficient than its older models, and costs 24 percent less to make.

Both Dell and Hewlett-Packard were in attendance at the Facebook event, and Dell's Data Center Solutions group said has designed and built a data center solution using components from the Open Compute project. Dell said separately that it will invest $1 billion to deliver solutions including cloud services, and build multiple data centers over the next 24 months to deliver private and public cloud technologies.

Forrest Norrod, general manager of Dell's server platforms, told reporters and Facebook employees that Dell had already deployed Open Compute-compliant hardware, at Prineville and elsewhere. "I think it will help turbocharge innovation and drive end-to-end efficiency," Norrod said.

A server architect at Hewlett-Packard agreed. "The ability to build a server from these designs...will increase the pace of innovation," said Fred Worley, an SCI system architect for HP's Scalable Computing and Infrastructure division.

However, Worley said that what the Open Compute specifications cover is just one application across a broad base of possibilities.

"What they presented today is to take the data centers, the servers inside them, and the cooling, as one block," Worley said. "All the servers in it are like motherboards and drives. They have built that solution for one specific application, or one specific targeted customer. OEMs have a broad set of customers across a broad set of markets. If we were to say, okay, this solution is right for you..."

Facebook's Frank Frankovsky disagreed. Frankovsky, a former data center solutions director at Dell, said that the design of the Open Computer servers could be applied to a broad swathe of the industry.

"Even if you look at our architecture, it's not that dissimilar from other people's architecture," Frankovsky said in an interview. "You've got a web machine on the front end, you've got a web cache that runs memcache behind it, and these servers are really optimized for more of a scaling kind of an architecture. I think it's pretty broadly applicable."

Graham Weston, the chairman of Rackspace, said that his company would use the new Open Compute servers in its own designs, and Zynga's chief technical officer said that his company would take a serious look at adding the new technology to its own cloud. If nothing else, the open-source, energy-efficient server design sets a direction for the industry, said Jason Waxman, general manager in charge of Intel's Server Platforms Group, who compared it to the launch of the Toyota Prius - if Toyota published the specifications so that kit builders could make their own.

The new servers

Facebook used its data center in Prineville, Ore. as the showcase for its discussion. The company didn't say how many servers are contained within the the building, although Richard Fichera, an analyst for Forrester, said that the data center measures 150,000 square feet, with a second, equally-sized facility planned for next year.

But Facebook executives said that the facility itself does not use air conditioning - a key component of power costs. Instead, it uses natural air to cool the servers, with a ductless evaporative cooling system to help chill the servers without the need for dedicated air conditioning.

Inside, the servers - which Facebook designed in conjunction with Quanta - Facebook uses either a custom motherboard designed around either an AMD or an Intel processor. Facebook also designed a custom power delivery mechanism that eliminates several step-down steps that can waste power: the data center wastes just 2 percent power, executives said.

The servers themselves are 1.5U high, half again as high as the normal 1-U rack, Facebook executives said. That allows Facebook to build more space in the racks for cooling; the company used 60-mm fans to move more air with less power, they said. The racks are built on shelves, so they can be easily serviced.

Richard Fichera, an analyst at Forrester, claimed that the servers are divide into two categories: the Web tier, a high-power server that uses dual-socket, 8-core Xeon X5650 chips; and the Memcache tier, which uses less CPU, and more memory, and incorporates 8-core "Magny Cours" AMD processors, he said in a blog post. Each server can have up to 6 local disks.

The power supplies are more than 93 percent efficient, almost heard of in an industry where 90 percent efficiency is considered outstanding. For backup power, they use a modular 48V DC battery backup unit that supplies up to six servers through a DC-DC converter in each server. Each battery is connected via the network, so that the Facebook IT managers can monitor the health of the system.

Unlike other open-source licenses, designers aren't required to contribute back to the Open Compute designs if they incorporate them and then layer on their own expertise, Facebook's Frankovsky said. "We encourage people to contribute back," he said. "We will learn a lot from their contributions."

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
More »

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service

//our current issue

Select Term:

24 issues for $29.99 ONLY $1.25 an issue! Lock in Your Savings!

12 issues for $19.99ONLY $1.67 an issue!

State

Country

This transaction is secure

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service